On Thu, 29 Jul 1999, David Krings wrote:
> >hundreds of thousands of web wanderers are learning to trivially
> >and tranparently download and install all manner of windoze stuff.
>
> Oke, the difference is, that i never had problems to install software
> under windows, under linux i normally do. I run my W95 system since
> september 95 without any problems, the only time i had to reinstall it was
> when i installed a broken bus master driver and hat not a working one right
> by hand (well, i could have booted it with the rescue disk and then put in
> a working one, i bet that would have worked - similar to what one has to do
> with Linux).
There is a very important reason for this disparity. With Windows, everyone
has exactly the same system (more or less). As a developer, I know that you're
running Windows, so I write a Windows program, and assume that you have all the
Windows DLL's that Billy Boy requires you to have. But under Linux, I don't
know what you have. With your new found freedom of choice, you might have
chosen not to install the gtk, or Qt, or even X for that matter. I don't know
what versions of shared libraries you have, since they're not automatically
updated everytime you install a MS program.
However, I doubt that hundreds of thousands of web wanderers find Windows
installations trivial. Back when I was running Windows, I had five different VB
runtime libraries, three MFC DLL's, and hundreds of VBX's and OCX's, but I never
had the right one for the current install. Sometimes the ones I needed simply
were not to be found except on the newest official Microsoft applications.
Trying to install a Windows program without vbrun500 will give you exactly the
same kind of errors (if InstallShield bothers to check) as you would get trying
to install KDE without Qt.
> >i've tried rpms cause they are supposed to do most of the work for
> >me and keep track of everything and I've tried source tar balls
> >cause they are supposed to give me control of the process.
>
> I agree, the rpms are more intelligent than just compiling programs. But
> it seems that many programmers reject to issue their programs as rpms.
Not every distribution uses RPM's. And not every Unix program is for Linux. By
releasing a program as source code with autoconf/automake, a developer can
target Redhat, Debian, SuSE, etc, along with Solaris, SunOS, AIX, HPUS, Irix,
*BSD, and every other Unix variety.
This scheme makes installation harder, but true portability is assured.
In short, freedom (of any kind) is a trade off. The more the choices, the more
the confusion.
--
Arandir...
_______________________________
<http://www.meer.net/~arandir/>
